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[RetroNeo Games]

Getting the new demo ready for Eirtakon, starting next Friday in Dublin and running all weekend. Only 3 days left!!

To get dialogue and instructions in, I'm finally getting around to implementing the fantastic Fungus tool for Unity. You can easily make entire text-based adventures in the engine without any coding knowledge, but in my case I'll be using it for mid-mission text info, cutscenes, and for its handy localisation spreadsheet exports.

[RetroNeo Games]

Today I'm changed the arbitrary progression slider to 30%! Yay! What does this mean?
I don't know. Work continues. It's been a while since I bumped it to 20%.

It's really hard to say how complete a game ever is. There's a famous saying that the first 90% of development is a lot easier than the last 90%. Meaning basically when the game is 'done' in your mind, the polish, marketing, testing, and bug fixing still are a huge part of what's left.

However, this game was planned as a 2 year project initially, and yesterday marked 18 months. It looks like we'll go longer than 2 years now, since it took so long to find our art style, but 30% does feel more accurate than 20% today, so I'm bumping it up.

Getting there!

[RetroNeo Games]

Here's our first pass at turning the default Fungus dialogue window into a SOS-ified version. Now all I have to do (apart from finding a better place for it to sit) is to write some better dialogue

[RetroNeo Games]

It's been a busy week! I made myself very sick crunching through a bad cold in perparation for Eirtakon. missed the first day of it, but dragged myself in for day 2 and 3 to get much needed feedback from the demo I'd spent so long on.

There wasn't massive foot traffic, but responses were generally positive, and a lot of people beat the demo, which never really happened with the old demo.

My weekend was made when a girl ACTUALLY paused the game to look up the controls, tested the keyboard controls, then the gamepad, and continued through two game crashes (didn't happen anyway else!) to beat the demo. Most polite gamer I've ever met. Thank you, Karen! Pleasure to meet you!

In the days since I've been fixing bugs, making tweaks, moving away from the old particle system to the new proper ones, incorporating a bit of feedback and generally polishing up the demo in preparation for making it available online in the next few days.

[RetroNeo Games]

Woohoo! Today's the day I can put our first (real, new) demo out into the world. It's still a pre-alpha - a half a vertical slice (since the strategy layer is absent) but this demo now finally has the correct art direction for the game, and a lot of the gameplay features, including a condensed story using the Fungus plugin for Unity.

I hope you play it, and leave feedback here or anywhere whether you enjoyed it or not. Every little bit of information helps us make a better game.

Thank you!

PS Download it from the link on Page 1, which is kept up to date.

[RetroNeo Games]

Here's a GIF of the new tilt animations that occur while turning. It's more extreme the faster you're going.
This was quite hard to get working well because we don't have a 3D model in to simply tilt, but are using sprite sheets for the ship rolling, but then rolling thrusters and trails/lasers around in 3D space as if they're on a model that isn't really there, so not everything always lines up, and deciding what speed and what degree of movement to give everything is a total 'eyeball it' manoeuvre.

Also want to remind you that as of yesterday you can try out the new demo yourself! Link in the post above or the 1st post in this thread.

[RetroNeo Games]

So the livestreaming experiment continues. Most recently we dug into the code of the Unity plugin 'Fungus' by Snozbot. It's a free plugin that's great for adventures games, or any sort of narrative, or branching text/logic.

We hacked it a little to add a function we specifically wanted for Sons of Sol: Crow's Nest (it wouldn't be that important in text adventures).

We also started adding the names of people in the chat into the game as characters.

[RetroNeo Games]

3 weeks since a post! My bad! And it's not like nothing has happened. It's been very busy, in fact. Just too busy to get around to making GIFs and posting blog updates apparently.

Well, wonder no more. We've a lot of kinks worked out and can now randomly (or deliberately) generate a large number of male characters of difference ethnicities. There are still some kinks to work out. When they've been sorted, we'll know exactly how we need to bring in the set of female assets to save time in getting the right scales, colour tones, and masks.

In the game you can fully customise your wingmates' appearance (as in Xcom) and write their biographies. An obituary system would be nice too, wouldn't it?.. Hm..

[RetroNeo Games]

First update of the new year! We're working towards that vertical slice of sweet sweet virtual gameplay cake... cough.

Here you can see the Wing Commander-style rooms we have. There's concepts for a pilot bar, briefing room, and hangar in there. A bridge and training simulator room are also listed on the elevator but won't be in the vertical slice. We're also not sure if we'll use a hub room, actual elevator, or just this menu.

All the golden screens will contain relevant stuff, but are just placeholding for now.

What do you think?

[Pixel Noise]

Nice character customization - and I really like the rooms, especially the Pilot Bar! Great atmosphere.

[RetroNeo Games]

Thanks PN! And thanks for continuing to follow.

We're working on the vertical slice at the moment, which will be to combine the current combat demo with a trip back to these rooms in the carrier.

After that, the next task is a new trailer and Green Light.
Getting there..

[RetroNeo Games]

I've updated the demo today to version 0.2.3 from 0.2.2. There's just a few polish changes. The vertical slice is still on the way.

Here's the changes list from the ReadMe in the download:

Version 0.2.3
* Added camera shake and blur when using afterburners
* New pilot names and callsigns added.
* Added a 'No Target' indicator when missiles are pressed but don't lock on something.
* Can now quit out of radial orders menu with 'Esc' key if preferred.
* Can now skip all dialogue messages, including ones that formerly only faded with time.
* Reduced enemy fighter 'mass' from 1.5 tonnes to 1 (same as player), with same thruster power so now it doesn't drift as far away while turning.
* Improvements to explosion particles.

[RetroNeo Games]

So here's some news. We've changed the name of the game!

We were making a trailer and it brought up the discussion of the name being a bit long for a first indie game in an unknown series.
I had chosen the name originally, but I didn't disagree. We asked advice and everyone, including myself, thought we should shorten it.
So we've dropped "Crow's Nest" from the title!

Now, to track down all the internet places and soon-to-be-broken links that have crow's nest on them.. Sigh. Got to be done.

Oh what's that? The trailer? Oh sure, here it is.

[RetroNeo Games]

What a busy few weeks!!

We've been moving towards the vertical slice demo which was to release to coincide with our Greenlight campaign, then Steam shifts the goalposts and announces that they're doing away with Greenlight very soon, replacing it with a fee that could be up to $5,000 to get on the store!!

While it may not be that high, it does warrant a shift in priorities to get up on Greenlight sooner rather than later, so now we're probably going to launch with the trailer we already have and a few less-than-perfect screenshots and no demo to accompany it. The polished demo would have been our carrot on a stick to the bigger media outlets to hopefully get a little attention and push us through.

I predict a large number of new Greenlight campaigns in the coming weeks though, so best to get up there asap, since we were close(ish) to ready anyway.

On other news, accounting and trademarks are expensive! But all part of the business.

We'll also soon be taking a few preorders on our website. Buyers will later be sent Steam keys (or their choice of alternatives) once available. This is more to prove interest to investors (and active commerce for grants purposes) than to make any real money, but again, it's all part of the process.

It's bound to be a busy few weeks.

Oh! And we're at Minevention in the RDS in Dublin next weekend, if anyone lives nearby..

[RetroNeo Games]

Today's the day I give another arbitrary jump in the completion notch. We're up to 40% now! Whatever that means..
Are 40% of the game's assets done?... no probably not. But if you count pre-production time are we over 40% of the way to completion? Yes. The game is almost 21 months in production and scheduled to release in Q4 (I've just updated that from Q2) of this year, though that date may change. But it justifies the 40% I feel, at least.

One consideration is that November and December are really bad times to release an indie game. So while we may be ready by then, it might be better not to release until early 2018, as far off as that seems now. A new-release indie game can't compete with Steam Holiday sales.

But that's all for the future. We may even be done sooner than predicted (said no game dev ever!).

[RetroNeo Games]

So we are on Greenlight!

I launched the campaign about 30 hours ago and only got a little promo done before I was scheduled to leave for a quick 24 hour holiday. As I said before, Steam kind of made getting on Greenlight sooner a new priority - the holiday was already planned, and much needed for all involved.

We've 197 yes votes, but an almost equal number of no votes. That's higher than the average (about 1 in 3) but we are a niche kind of game (space games) so I won't sweat that too much. We're 13% towards the top 100 at the time of writing.

If you're reading this, we'd really appreciate your votes and any onward shares you'd care to provide.
Now to contact proper press and see how well we do out of that (traditionally, they don't care about Greenlight, but we'll see..)
Talk soon..

[nestoriaan]

Yes vote given, of course!

I hope you will update this log about the progress of the campaign. It's always interesting to hear how it pans out, even if Greenlight probably will disappear before we will be ready for launch.

[RetroNeo Games]

Thanks very much nestoriaan.
It's a pity they're getting rid of it too soon for you. Hopefully the price won't be too high in future, or will at least be easy to recoup. It's weird. They're trying to fix Greenlight, but just making new problems. Whether it'll be a net improvement or not remains to be seen.

I'm not sure how much I'll share of the votes. Honestly haven't thought about it yet. We're at about 200 yes votes so far, but the no votes are above the average which I'm not thrilled about, even though we are a niche game.
I'll probably wait until we're done to summarise the whole thing (hopefully positively).

Thanks for your vote! Good luck with Corsair.

[nestoriaan]

Well it's still to early to tell how Steam Direct will work. It could even be positive for us, who knows.

Just share as much as you like!

From what I have read about Greenlight it can take some time, but good games always seem to go through, even if they are a bit niche.

[RetroNeo Games]

Well that's always been the case really, yeah. Even if they get low votes and take months, they tend to get through. The issue now is if they end Greenlight before we're through.